Emily Shortslef
Education:
PhD, English, Columbia University (2015)
MA, English, Syracuse University (2008)
BA, English, Andrews University (2005)
MA, English, Syracuse University (2008)
BA, English, Andrews University (2005)
Biography:
My research focuses on early modern literature, particularly the theatrical drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. My first book, The Drama of Complaint: Ethical Provocations in Shakespeare’s Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2023), examines Shakespeare’s engagement with poetic forms of complaint, and argues that these conventional forms were vehicles for unconventional philosophical thought on the early modern stage. Exploring moral treatises and essays, Reformed theology, sermons, and conduct manuals, as well as drama and poetry, it shows how complaint—at its most basic, an expression of discontent and desire—operates across early modern discourses as a site of thought about human flourishing. The book also argues that by reconfiguring these familiar poetic forms, Shakespeare’s theatrical scenes of complaint model and elicit new forms of thinking about virtuous ways of desiring, acting, and living. The Drama of Complaint was a finalist for the 2024 Shakespeare Association of America First Book Award.
Research Interests:
Renaissance/ early modern literature
Shakespeare
Selected Publications:
BOOK
ARTICLES & BOOK CHAPTERS
"Tricks and the (tragi)comic art of survival," forthcoming in ELR: English Literary Renaissance
"Revenge Tragedy and 'extremest law': Punishment and Pardon in The Tragedy of Hoffman," Renaissance Drama 52.2 (2024)
"The Virtue in Complaining," in Shakespeare's Virtuous Theatre: Power, Capacity and the Good, eds. Carolyn Sale, Kent Lehnhof, and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
"Acts of Will: Countersovereignty and Complaining in The Tragedy of Mariam," in Early Modern Women's Complaint, eds. Sarah C. E. Ross and Rosalind Smith (Palgrave, 2020)
"The Undemanding Dead: Fantasy and Trauma in The Spanish Tragedy and Post-Reformation Revenge Drama," ELH 86.2 (2019)
"Face to Face, Hand to Hand: Relations of Exchange in Hamlet," in Face-to-Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy, eds. Matthew J. Smith and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)
"'A thousand several tongues': The Drama of Conscience and the Complaint of the Other in Shakespeare's Richard III," Exemplaria 29.2 (2017): 11-35
"Second Life: The Ruines of Time and the Virtual Collectivities of Early Modern Complaint," Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13.3 (2013): 84-104
"Acting as an Epitaph: Performing Commemoration in the Shakespearean History Play," Critical Survey 22.2 (2010): 11-24
